What the Shutdown Says About the Future of the Democrats

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Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, at a press conference about the government shutdown on Saturday.CreditPete Marovich for The New York Times

By Michael Tomasky

Jan. 20, 2018

Surprised that the Democrats stuck to their guns on the shutdown, even opening themselves up to the charge that they are “far more concerned with illegal immigrants” than with the military and border security, as President Trump put it in a Saturday morning tweet?

Don’t be. It’s been coming for a while. And while liberals should cheer it in the short term, all citizens should be aware of the potential long-term stakes for the republic of the Democrats becoming more a mirror image of the Republican Party.

First, let’s establish that we agree that this is not your father’s Democratic Party. Democratic leaders of a generation ago would have been paralyzed with fear at being branded the way Mr. Trump described them this weekend. Part of the change is grounded straightforwardly in public opinion. Twenty years ago the polling on Dreamers would surely have been very different; today, poll after poll shows 80 or 90 percent of respondents supporting the Democratic position that they be permitted to stay and given a path to citizenship.

But another part of the change is that the Democrats, little bit by little bit, are becoming more like the Republicans. Critics of our polarized conditions who have blamed both parties equally don’t understand that the parties are fundamentally different creatures. The Republican Party is a movement party. The Democratic Party is not.

Go back 40 years, and the Republicans were a historically typical American political party — that is, a jury-rigged coalition that had moderates and conservatives and even a few actual liberals. But conservatives started to dominate in Ronald Reagan’s time. Then, by about 20 years ago, the conservative movement swallowed the Republican Party, and it’s been masticating on it ever since.

Democrats have been a different story. They lost their Southerners to the Republicans, so they became more liberal. But they were not subsumed whole cloth by a liberal movement. There was no liberal movement to speak of in the 1990s. Indeed, there was an anti-liberal movement: the neoliberal, Third Way program that sought to distance itself from the old liberalism. The Democratic Party of today is still that coalition of liberal and center.

Some statistics bear out the differences. In their important 2016 book “Asymmetric Politics,” the political scientists Matt Grossman and David A. Hopkins cite some research from roughly 2008 to 2014 showing that rank-and-file Republicans are much more ideologically demanding than Democrats. For example, nearly 60 percent of Republicans preferred “ideological purity” to “moderation,” whereas for Democrats that number was around 40 percent.

In addition, when asked to place themselves ideologically, 43 percent of Republicans said they were conservative, compared with only 20 percent of Democrats who called themselves liberal. In fact, more Democrats, 31 percent, said they were moderate. Just 19 percent of Republicans said so. Even about 10 percent of Democrats said they were conservative or slightly so. On the Republican side, the comparable numbers were negligible.

Those numbers are telling. They describe two very different political parties. But — they’re also a few years old. And I bet they’re changing.

They started changing in the latter part of the Obama era, as rank-and-file Democrats became impatient for their party’s leaders to endorse much bolder approaches to inequality and other economic challenges, an impatience that drove the enthusiasm behind Bernie Sanders’s campaign. And since Mr. Trump has been president, rank-and-file Democrats have become energized and aggressive in ways we’ve not seen in 50 years.

Chuck Schumer, the Democrats’ leader in the Senate, is not himself a to-the-barricades kind of guy. But in the wake of the 2016 election, he’s been attuned to where things are headed. He added Mr. Sanders to an expanded leadership team. In last year’s contest for a new chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Mr. Schumer backed Representative Keith Ellison, the favorite candidate of the Sanders wing.

And now, he has led his party into a possibly risky government shutdown. It’s not because he’s a different person than he once was, or because he’s somehow tougher than his predecessor, Harry Reid. It’s because the Democratic base demands it, in a way that base would not have, I believe, a decade or so ago.

For now, liberals should cheer this unreservedly. For one thing, the cause of these young undocumented Americans is a good one. But more broadly, the Republicans have been playing this way for years. If Democrats won’t, they’ll just lose. You can’t bring a squirt gun to the O.K. Corral.

At the same time, there are longer-term concerns that citizens should keep in the back of their minds — not about the Democratic Party, but about the republic. I believe the Democrats are still several years away from becoming a movement party in the way the Republicans are. And it’s not necessarily fated to happen, for a host of reasons, ranging from psychological differences between liberals and conservatives to the simple fact that there just aren’t as many liberals in the United States as there are conservatives.

But if it were to happen — if we were to have two movement-subsumed parties — we would be in for some pretty big changes. We would move inexorably toward a more parliamentary system. New parties would pop up in the center — at least one, and I think probably two. Eventually the Constitution would get a revisit. It’s a potentially ominous road. But for now, the Democrats have no choice but to walk it.

Michael Tomasky is a columnist for The Daily Beast and editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.